SITUATION

Prior to working with Mabo Media they had achieved good success selling their products online but were looking at ways to grow further. They had trialled achieving that growth through Google AdWords, which had been running profitably, but when they looked to push for more traffic they were struggling to achieve the ROI they needed. We were given the opportunity to work with the Sustainable Furniture AdWords account to see if we could achieve both the growth and the ROI they desired.

FOCUS

A large proportion of the spend in the account was on Google Shopping, so we restructured the shopping campaigns to give ourselves more control of bidding across the full catalogue of products. That meant we could grow each grouping of products individually and while there was a limit on how far certain products could be pushed with the ROI goals, it allowed us scope to take highly profitable areas further. But we found there were still limits to how far overall we could push the campaigns, and when analysing the search term reports found that there was a big discrepancy between the performance of generic keywords and the core longtail searches. So we took the decision to split the traffic by duplicating our campaigns and applying lower bids to the duplicate, then adding negative keywords for the generic terms to force them into the campaigns with the lower bids. That gave us scope to push the bids higher on the existing shopping campaigns that now only contained the higher performing traffic.

We also reintroduced search campaigns into the account. There had been some prior success there, but when pushed for growth they were the first to struggle so had been paused. However we found that although the limitations to how far we could push them might come earlier, there was still profitability to be had through search so it made sense to add them in even if they were only a small part of the overall sales pot.

IMPACT

The initial changes had a positive impact on ROI and we started to show consistent growth from there. But changing the strategy on shopping as mentioned above (splitting core and generic traffic) took us even further forward and meant that we not only achieved the growth targets set but actually surpassed the ROI goal.

In addition there was a significant knock on effect to overall sales – we assessed the multi-click attribution and found that AdWords was starting a greater number of conversion journeys than before that it wasn’t being credited for directly. We took the time to explain this information to the client so they could appreciate the impact and understand the data and then incorporated that into our strategy to allow us to push products and keywords that were contributing at all points of the buying cycle.